The Moving Target

#3 in the perfectionism series

Why the bar always rises the moment you reach it

Part I of V — The Misunderstanding · Article 3 of 25

I once spent six months working toward a specific outcome at work. I’ll spare you the details, but it was the kind of thing where you can name the goal in a sentence and an outside observer would say yes, that’s a real goal, and if you got there you’d have reason to feel okay about yourself for at least a week or two.

I got there. The week or two never showed up. What showed up, almost immediately, was a list of reasons the achievement didn’t actually count, or didn’t count enough, or didn’t count in the way I had hoped. Within about forty-eight hours of the milestone, I had already located the next thing the achievement was insufficient against. I noticed this at the time. I remember actually saying out loud, to no one, “well, that was fast.”

For a long time, I treated this as a personal moral failing. I thought I was just bad at savoring. I’d read articles about the importance of celebrating wins, and I’d try, dutifully, to celebrate them. I’d raise a glass with my wife. I’d take the afternoon off. The performance of celebration would happen on schedule. But the feeling the celebration was supposed to mark — the feeling of having arrived somewhere — was never quite present. Whatever I was raising a glass to, the inside of me had already moved past.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see what was actually happening. The moving target isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the system.

Here’s the mechanism. The perfectionist isn’t actually pursuing a goal. The perfectionist is using a goal as a placeholder for a feeling — the feeling of being okay, finally, in some basic identity-level way. The goal becomes a stand-in for that feeling. And the structure of the situation is set up so that the goal can never deliver the feeling, for a particular reason. The feeling is generated from inside, not from outside, and no external achievement can hand it to you. The mind that’s been generating insufficiency will, when the achievement arrives, generate more insufficiency. That’s what it does. That’s all it does. The goal moves because the goal-mechanism is doing identity work, and identity work is always unfinished.

I find this useful to look at because it dismantles a particular hope that perfectionists keep alive even when nothing else is going their way. The hope sounds like: “If I can just get to X, I’ll be okay.” X is whatever the current target is. The promotion. The book. The body. The recognition. The relationship. The hope is so foundational that questioning it feels almost rude. But the hope is a lie. The lie isn’t that you might fail to reach X. You might. The lie is what’s promised on the other side. The promise is that reaching X will deliver the feeling. It won’t. It has never. Look at your history.

This is one of the harder things to take in, because it requires giving up something that has been doing motivational work for a long time. The hope of the eventual arrival has been the engine. If you take the engine out, what runs the machine?

I’ll say more about that later. For now I just want to flag the pattern, because once you see it, you can’t really unsee it. The bar always rises. The next thing is always already there. The “okay” you were promised at the threshold has, on every previous occasion, declined to show up. There is information in that. The information is not that you need to try harder, or set bigger goals, or work on your gratitude. The information is that the entire frame is built on a misunderstanding about where the feeling comes from.

The feeling comes from inside. It always has. The achievement is unrelated to the feeling, except as a stage prop. Once you see this, the relationship to achievement can become very different. You can pursue things without needing them to do something they were never going to do. The goal can be a goal again. The feeling can be its own thing, separately, not contingent on the goal.

That sounds simple. It isn’t. But it’s at least pointed in a direction that has somewhere to go.

Next in the series — every Friday. See the Table of Contents for the next article in this series.

What are your thoughts on this? I’m curious. Share in the comments.

Thanks for reading! If you found this useful:

Save it for a time when you need a reminder.

Reread it. Let it settle. Because understanding this isn’t something you “get” once and you’re done.

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